Software-defined networking: A network game-changer?

Q&A with Andrew Lord, head of optical research at BT, about his impressions following the recent OFC/NFOEC show.

OFC/NFOEC reflections: Part 1

"We [operators] need to move faster"

Andrew Lord, BT

Q: What was your impression of the show?

A: Nothing out of the ordinary. I haven't come away clutching a whole bunch of results that I'm determined to go and check out, which I do sometimes.

I'm quite impressed by how the main equipment vendors have moved on to look seriously at post-100 Gigabit transmission. In fact we have some [equipment] in the labs [at BT]. That is moving on pretty quickly. I don't know if there is a need for it just yet but they are certainly getting out there, not with live chips but making serious noises on 400 Gig and beyond.

There was a talk on the CFP [module] and whether we are going to be moving to a coherent CFP at 100 Gig. So what is going to happen to those prices? Is there really going to be a role for non-coherent 100 Gig? That is still a question in my mind.

"Our dream future is that we would buy equipment from whomever we want and it works. Why can't we do that for the network?"

I was quite keen on that but I'm wondering if there is going to be a limited opportunity for the non-coherent 100 Gig variants. The coherent prices will drop and my feeling from this OFC is they are going to drop pretty quickly when people start putting these things [100 Gig coherent] in; we are putting them in. So I don't know quite what the scope is for people that are trying to push that [100 Gigabit direct detection].

What was noteworthy at the show?

There is much talk about software-defined networking (SDN), so much talk that a lot of people in my position have been describing it as hype. There is a robust debate internally [within BT] on the merits of SDN which is essentially a data centre activity. In a live network, can we make use of it? There is some skepticism.

I'm still fairly optimistic about SDN and the role it might have and the [OFC/NFOEC] conference helped that.

I'm expecting next year to be the SDN conference and I'd be surprised if SDN doesn't have a much greater impact then [OFC/NFOEC 2014] with more people demoing SDN use cases.

Why is there so much excitement about SDN?

Why now when it could have happened years ago? We could have all had GMPLS (Generalised Multi-Protocol Label Switching) control planes. We haven't got them. Control plane research has been around for a long time; we don't use it: we could but we don't. We are still sitting with heavy OpEx-centric networks, especially optical.

"The 'something different' this conference was spatial-division multiplexing"

So why are we getting excited? Getting the cost out of the operational side - the software-development side, and the ability to buy from whomever we want to.

For example, if we want to buy a new network, we put out a tender and have some 10 responses. It is hard to adjudicate them all equally when, with some of them, we'd have to start from scratch with software development, whereas with others we have a head start as our own management interface has already been developed. That shouldn't and doesn't need to be the case.

Opening the equipment's north-bound interface into our own OSS (operating systems support) in theory, and this is probably naive, any specific OSS we develop ought to work.

Our dream future is that we would buy equipment from whomever we want and it works. Why can't we do that for the network?

We want to as it means we can leverage competition but also we can get new network concepts and builds in quicker without having to suffer 18 months of writing new code to manage the thing. We used to do that but it is no longer acceptable. It is too expensive and time consuming; we need to move faster.

It [the interest in SDN] is just competition hotting up and costs getting harder to manage. This is an area that is now the focus and SDN possibly provides a way through that.

Another issue is the ability to put quickly new applications and services onto our networks. For example, a bank wants to do data backup but doesn't want to spend a year and resources developing something that it uses only occasionally. Is there a bandwidth-on-demand application we can put onto our basic network infrastructure? Why not?

SDN gives us a chance to do something like that, we could roll it out quickly for specific customers.

Anything else at OFC/NFOEC that struck you as noteworthy?  

The core networks aspect of OFC is really my main interest.

You are taking the components, a big part of OFC, and then the transmission experiments and all the great results that they get - multiple Terabits and new modulation formats - and then in networks you are saying: What can I build?

The networks have always been the poor relation. It has not had the great exposure or the same excitement. Well, now, the network is becoming centre stage.

As you see components and transmission mature - and it is maturing as the capacity we are seeing on a fibre is almost hitting the natural limit - so the spectral efficiency, the amount of bits you can squeeze in a single Hertz, is hitting the limit of 3,4,5,6 [bit/s/Hz]. You can't get much more than that if you want to go a reasonable distance.

So the big buzz word - 70 to 80 percent of the OFC papers we reviewed - was flex-grid, turning the optical spectrum in fibre into a much more flexible commodity where you can have wherever spectrum you want between nodes dynamically. Very, very interesting; loads of papers on that. How do you manage that? What benefits does it give?  

What did you learn from the show?

One area I don't get yet is spatial-division multiplexing. Fibre is filling up so where do we go? Well, we need to go somewhere because we are predicting our networks continuing to grow at 35 to 40 percent.

Now we are hitting a new era. Putting fibre in doesn't really solve the problem in terms of cost, energy and space. You are just layering solutions on top of each other and you don't get any more revenue from it. We are stuffed unless we do something different.

The 'something different' this conference was spatial-division multiplexing. You still have a single fibre but you put in multiple cores and that is the next way of increasing capacity. There is an awful lot of work being done in this area.

I gave a paper [pointing out the challenges]. I couldn't see how you would build the splicing equipment, how you would get this fibre qualified given the 30-40 years of expertise of companies like Corning making single mode fibre, are we really going to go through all that again for this new fibre? How long is that going to take? How do you align these things?

"SDN for many people is data centres and I think we [operators] mean something a bit different." 

I just presented the basic pitfalls from an operator's perspective of using this stuff. That is my skeptic side. But I could be proved wrong, it has happened before!

Anything you learned that got you excited?

One thing I saw is optics pushing out.

In the past we saw 100 Megabit and one Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) being king of a certain part of the network. People were talking about that becoming optics.

We are starting to see optics entering a new phase. Ten Gigabit Ethernet is a wavelength, a colour on a fibre. If the cost of those very simple 10GbE transceivers continues to drop, we will start to see optics enter a new phase where we could be seeing it all over the place: you have a GigE port, well, have a wavelength.

[When that happens] optics comes centre stage and then you have to address optical questions. This is exciting and Ericsson was talking a bit about that.

What will you be monitoring between now and the next OFC?

We are accelerating our SDN work. We see that as being game-changing in terms of networks. I've seen enough open standards emerging, enough will around the industry with the people I've spoken to, some of the vendors that want to do some work with us, that it is exciting. Things like 4k and 8k (ultra high definition) TV, providing the bandwidth to make this thing sensible.

"I don't think BT needs to be delving into the insides of an IP router trying to improve how it moves packets. That is not our job."

Think of a health application where you have a 4 or 8k TV camera giving an ultra high-res picture of a scan, piping that around the network at many many Gigabits. These type of applications are exciting and that is where we are going to be putting a bit more effort. Rather than the traditional just thinking about transmission, we are moving on to some solid networking; that is how we are migrating it in the group.

When you say open standards [for SDN], OpenFlow comes to mind.

OpenFlow is a lovely academic thing. It allows you to open a box for a university to try their own algorithms. But it doesn't really help us because we don't want to get down to that level.

I don't think BT needs to be delving into the insides of an IP router trying to improve how it moves packets. That is not our job.

What we need is the next level up: taking entire network functions and having them presented in an open way.

For example, something like OpenStack [the open source cloud computing software] that allows you to start to bring networking, and compute and memory resources in data centres together.

You can start to say: I have a data centre here, another here and some networking in between, how can I orchestrate all of that? I need to provide some backup or some protection, what gets all those diverse elements, in very different parts of the industry, what is it that will orchestrate that automatically?

That is the kind of open theme that operators are interested in.

That sounds different to what is being developed for SDN in the data centre. Are there two areas here: one networking and one the data centre?

You are quite right. SDN for many people is data centres and I think we mean something a bit different. We are trying to have multi-vendor leverage and as I've said, look at the software issues.

We also need to be a bit clearer as to what we mean by it [SDN].

Andrew Lord has been appointed technical chair at OFC/NFOEC

Further reading

Part 2: OFC/NFOEC 2013 industry reflections, click here

Part 3: OFC/NFOEC 2013 industry reflections, click here

Part 4: OFC/NFOEC industry reflections, click here

Part 5: OFC/NFEC 2013 industry reflections, click here